


when y0u were y0ung

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pre-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 19:16:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia Megido has morbid hobbies, and Sollux Captor has very bad teeth.  Dumb pale flirting.  Teens holding hands.  Graverobbing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when y0u were y0ung

Sollux Captor once swore very, very firmly to Karkat Vantas that he'd rather be shot through the prefrontal cortices with a military-grade assault rifle than endure anything resembling a miserable session of Cooperative Outdoor Fun and Games With Pals.  There are times, however, when a young troll is obliged to renege on even the mostly fervently sworn oaths.  To his chagrin, Sollux has found himself venturing outside his respiteblock and braving the elements on a semiregular basis for the past half-sweep.  Romance, as it turns out, makes everyone a big fucking idiot.

"All right," Aradia says, stepping back from the frame and wiping her hands on her raggedy work skirt.  "The spine is secure - pass me the ribcage?"  
  
They're about a mile away from her hivestem; she's been digging out a skeleton all perigee, curing the bones with bleach and some other noxious substances in small tubs, every one of them carefully labeled and painstakingly assembled.  He asked her if she couldn't just grab the whole thing and do this shit indoors, but she told him to suck it up and camp happily - so camp he does.  Apparently these fumes are a little too noxious to be taken inside the hive.  
  
Alternia is in its second spring of the sweep; the moons are glimmering in the zeniths of their nightly orbit, fair weather and nice breezes.  The bees are enjoying it.  Aradia is enjoying the thawed earth, the sweet moonlight, and the fresh air.  Sollux yearns for the santized, temperature-controlled air of his ventshafts.  Surely this much exposure to nature can't be _healthy._  
  
"You're sure it's a troll skeleton?" he asks, passing her the tub containing the cured ribcage.  It's elongated and unpleasantly squashed in appearance - there were three large fractures, so she had to do some preliminary fixes, but even post-fixing it's obviously abnormal.  "I mean, this guy looks kind of fucked up."  
  
"Of course it is, silly," Aradia giggles, carefully lowering the ribs over the reassembled spine.  "Hold it right here - " (he complies, using his psionics) " - perfect, let me just get the collarbone and the shoulders, it won't take long."  The assembly process is a lot easier for her if he levitates pieces while she wires and solders them into place on the frame  - a habit he's taken up since the first time she gangpressed him into visiting a dig.  He bitches - mothergrub does he bitch - but he enjoys it.  "It'll be obvious once this is done.  She was about - I don't know the precise hue, but she fell somewhere between you and Tavros on the hemospectrum."  
  
The dead troll was obviously culled with a blunt weapon, probably subjuggulator work, she explained to him over Trollian; it wasn't just the ribs that were fractured.  The skull and the spine were also heavily damaged before death and wasn't it marvelous, Sollux, wasn't it fascinating?  Culled right before first winter set in!  _gro22, AA._  
  
She doesn't save all of the skeletons she finds - people only bury murder victims, instead of giving them a proper open-air corpse disposal affair, because when it's a murder they have something to hide. Normally the preponderance of recently deceased bodies annoys the piss out of Aradia: she's in it for the fossils.  This one, however, was so severely mutated that the skeleton looked positively frightful - and the horns were magnificent, crazy curling things, something you'd expect to find on a highblood.  A rack like that on a mutant lowblood would have been visually jarring even while the poor fucker was alive; post-mortem, the horns look even larger.  
  
 _0nce assembled it w0uld l00k very sp00ky in the annex cell!_ she'd said.   
  
 _you're offiiciially morbiid a2 fuck. let'2 do iit._  
  
"... Hey, AA," Sollux says, half his concentration on the bones he's keeping midair, the rest of his consciousness wandering over Aradia's gawky elbows, her dirty knees and scuffed sneakers.  "You ever think about sending these to, I dunno, some kind of museum?"  
  
Aradia pauses, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind her ear.  She purses her lips at him.  "Sollux," she says, with the utmost gentleness, "they wouldn't want it."  
  
She's right, of course, they wouldn't.  Because it's a lowblood murder victim and a genetic oddity and museums are run by pompous highbloods who will see millions of those in their sweeps, watching the lower strata rise and fall like second summer's glutinous mealgrain.  And because only a forensics expert would be interested, and a sufficiently enterprising forensics expert could easily find or make their own dead body to tinker with.  And Aradia will never be a skull curator or a proper hierarcheologist, because she won't live long enough. It's an upper crust career.  Rude of him to mention it.  Fumbling, he backtracks.  
  
"Shit.  Sorry.  You're fucking great at this, though, it's so stupid that - I mean, it's a fucking shame, is all.  It's good enough to be in a museum.  Not just the, uh, not just this one, the fossils, too - the ones we put together last perigee -"  
  
"You look dumb when you stutter," Aradia tells him, grinning and pressing a single conciliatory kiss to his cheek.  Her eyes glitter like diamonds.  Her hair smells like cinnamon and earth; Sollux swallows around the lump in his throat, and wonders what the hell he's going to do with himself when she's gone.   
  
"Sorry, AA."  
  
"... Sollux, don't do this for me when I'm dead," she says, giving him an eerie look and gesturing at the whole work lot - the tubs of bones, the jugs of fluid, the slowly-assembling skeleton on the stand.  It's always been a little alarming, how she can catch the train of his thoughts.  "I don't want that."  
  
"Whoa.  Hard bargain, missy.  I'll write you a virus, instead," he promises, and gives her a toothy smile.  (She went nuts over his teeth, the first time they met in person - to her they're fantastic, a thrilling example of mutation, and wouldn't he make the darlingest fossil?  It was the first and only time anyone had ever been genuinely pleased by his ugly dental situation. He has noticed, with a pale flush, that he smiles easier when he's talking to her; even if it's just over Trollian.)  "Something in ~ATH.  I'll call it megido."  
  
Aradia grins so hard Sollux thinks her dimples might break, and goes back to carefully attaching the ribs to the spine and shoulders - adjusting the position of a few metal struts, giving him a thumbs-up and tapping a bone when he doesn't have to levitate it anymore.  The moons are beginning to set; the stars above them glitter like knives.  
  
If he writes it in ~ATH, megido will be around until doomsday.  
  
"Ahem.  Obviously, mister Captor, if we were bloodswapped," she says, a light flush to her cheeks as she refuses to look him in the eye, "I'd be on your choice skeleton like a cholerbear on an apiculture hive."  Sollux finds himself flushed, as well.  Aradia's modus of flirtation is as strange and endearing as the lady herself.  
  
"It's a real crying shame," Sollux agrees.  He feels warm, right around where his bloodpusher thumps.  "You're never gonna get to put my skull on the mantlepiece and tell your morticiannuler friends how I used to lisp."  
  
"I know!  Biggest regret, right there."  
  
"I weep about it sometimes."  
  
"All those dead moirail jokes and funny impressions, Sollux.  I'd be a riot."  
  
"It's okay," he tells her, settling an awkward arm around her waist and leaning in for a hug.  They can't look each other in the eye out of mutual embarrassment; he feels like he's drowning in the tenderest, most overwhelming pity imaginable.  It's awful, and it's brilliant.  The universe is gigantic, and they are so small and here for such a short, short time, and sometimes awareness of that fact is overwhelming.  He'd not sure how he could cope without her.  "I'll write a chat bot that tells dead Sollux jokes in your stupid quirk.  You know.  To keep me company in my Helm."  
  
"You sentimental fuckruckus," she murmurs, putting down the humerus and the spool of wire and hugging him back.  Her arms are solid, and her body is warmer than his, and she's holding him tightly.  Sollux shuts his eyes, and breathes.  "You're too good for shipwork!"  
  
"You're the sentimental fuckruckus," he whispers back.  
  
"No, you."  
  
"No, you."  
  
"No, you -"  
  
They whisper back and forth in hushed voices for a while - he strokes her hair, and she runs a hand over the bumps of his spine, and they hold each other's hands while they assemble the skeleton until the dawn begins to break on the horizon, sending bright claws of light through the hazy spring atmosphere.  
  
Parting is always a bittersweet affair.  Sollux flies her and the finished specimen back to her hivestem, and makes it back to his own recuperacoon before the sun really emerges.  For a while he mopes about having to leave, but in retrospect, it's one of the nicest nights he's had all sweep. The memory of it keeps him absurdly happy through long hours of coding and hive maintenance and debugging and trolling his other friends; he's bemused with himself, a little creeped out by his own good mood.

He's so pale for her it seems completely indecent.  
  
When he recounts the evening Karkat tells him they're a pair of morbid, pessimistic fucks, the way they carry on about dying all the time like it's some kind of private joke.  Karkat is a pancracked mental case who doesn't understand romance and needs a swift kick in the shame globes.  Sollux and Aradia are wild optimists, if anything.  
  
After all, they like to pretend they're going to die of old age.  
  
Nothing could be more optimistic than that.


End file.
